In many countries, Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) establishes less strict dismissal procedures for specific groups of workers. This paper builds a simple matching model with heterogeneous workers in order to analyze this feature of EPL. We use the model to analyze the effects of reforms...

Over the period 19952006 the Spanish economy experienced a rapid increase in employment and output growth, a surge in investment over GDP, a substantial deterioration in the current account balance and an improvement in the finances of the social security system. This paper presents a dynamic...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labor market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

In order to offer a balanced assessment of the role of minimum wages in the Welfare State, seven basic questions need to be answered: (i) Why is the minimum wage a useful redistributive tool?; (ii) How binding are minimum wage floors in different countries?; (iii) To what extent do minimum wages...

This paper examines the empirical evidence regarding the poor performance of the youth labor market in Spain over the last two decades, which entails very high unemployment for both higher and lower educated workers, symptoms of over-education, and low intensity of on-the-job training. It also...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labor market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees, makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...